Long Term Evolution (LTE) or 4G network is a wireless communication network designed to provide subscribers with a high speed internet experience on their mobile devices without any traffic restrictions either in the mobile device or in the network. One of the requirements of LTE is to provide unbroken connections between base stations, also called Evolved Node Bs or eNodeBs or eNBs, and User Equipment (UEs) moving at high speeds. This feature of providing unbroken connections may be accomplished by a serving base station by performing a handover or handoff to another base station. The serving base station or serving eNB decides when to initiate the handover and to which eNB the UE needs to be handed over. These handovers may be based on the UE signal strength measurements of the Neighbour eNBs.
The serving eNB knows its neighbours through a Neighbour Relation Table (NRT) or a neighbour list. An eNB uses the NRT to determine which neighbour to handover a UE to. Typically, an eNB neighbour is added and maintained manually by the network operator. The neighbour list generation and maintenance may turn out to be a significant overhead in the existing mobile networks especially when the networks are expanded and new eNBs are added. For LTE, the task of manually maintaining a neighbour list is further challenging for operators because in addition to defining intra LTE neighbour relations, the operator also has to provision 2G and 3G neighbours. To overcome this overhead, the 3GPP standard covering LTE specifies an Automatic Neighbour Relation (ANR) function wherein UEs connected to a serving eNB may provide information regarding neighbouring eNBs to the serving eNB. The serving eNB may then update its NRT based on this information. However, in this case, the number of neighbours reported by the UEs may be substantially high and processing the high number of neighbours to decide the target neighbour for handover may be time consuming and computationally intensive.